The Last of Sunset (One Soldier, WWII) A Short Story

The Last of Sunset
(One Soldier, WWII)


((The End) (The Last of Sunset))


Grandfather stood in the last of sunset in the open door, his fingers holding onto the end of his pipe, and his other hand and arm wound strong and steady around a broom, it was the last months of the war, 1945.
When the message came about Frank, he just lowered the broom to its side against hanging jackets next to the screened in door. And went to sit down in a kitchen chair around the corner of the parlor, the table being against the wall, I was eight-years old then, would be nine in two months. Grandpa sat slowly down and looked at the piece of paper, his older son Wally got out of the mailbox on the porch, he had handed it to him. He already knew beforehand what it was. He didn’t speak to anyone in the house. Just looked at the characterless envelope, it had no stamp on it; didn’t need one. He waited for his son, the older one to return, to come down from his attic bedroom.
“I can’t open it. You open it please.” He said to Wally.
“Damn Italy! Damn them Germans!” And then he grabbed his father and held him, trying to hold him. And that was all.

One day there was a call to arms, a war to fight, like my grandfather did in WWI, six-thousand miles away. And he went, and Uncle Frank now twenty some years later, got that same calling. He one morning got up out of bed and had breakfast and he was gone, just like that. He went to boot camp, someplace down south, and then onto Europe, to Italy, and that was all of him.

And in the next months and years to come, he would see pictures at the cinema, and in the papers, of a war that was. Names and pictures of dead soldiers, again, and again, and again. People who loved their sons and brothers, as we all loved Frank.


((The Beginning)(One Soldier))


“I got to go to war Paw,” Frank said.
“Why? He said, hesitantly, “I just don’t see any use in it any more, our country ain’t being invaded.”
“Germany and Italy started one and now Japan hit us in Pearl Harbor, besides it’s the right thing to do.”
“My brother Wally went paw, was a POW, now he’s home, he got a Purple Heart, I need to go.”
“The good it does for anyone I’ll never know. I went to war; Wally went to war, to protect a country that doesn’t need any protecting.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to go, I’m eighteen now.”
“Of course you got to go,” my grandfather said, “those Germans—”
“Go get me a hand full of tobacco out of my bedroom,” grandpa asked Frank.

So Frank got ready. And Uncle Wally came down from the bedroom attic to give him a ride to the Minneapolis’ induction center. Mother washed and mended his cloths before he left. That night I had overheard her talking to Anne, her older sister on the telephone, she said “I want him to go, and paw I think wants him to go, but neither one of us want him to go. I just don’t understand it, and I won’t ever, and so don’t expect me to.”
Then I walked back up stairs to the attic bedrooms, and laid down still and my head fell back into a feathered pillow maw and Aunt Betty, and grandma—before she died in 1933 of pneumonia—filled this pillow with chicken feathers. And I wasn’t talking to myself, I wasn’t talking to anybody, but I heard a voice in my head, “He’s got to go, nothing you can do about it,” it said. And I said out loud, “Them Germans—”
“Shoo,” said Uncle Wally, “we can’t do anything.”
I turned over softly, and kind of heaved over toward the side, looking at the rug beside my bed, on the floor in the dark.
“Anyhow,” said Uncle Wally, “he’ll be alright.”
But I knew, even at that age, folks don’t’ go to war for the amusement of it, nor leave their family for the fun of it, but Wally wanted me to go back to sleep, he said he had to give Frank a ride in the early morning to the induction center, he had to take his oath, I guess. I turned about on my bed onto my back, I told that voice in my head to ‘Shut up,” that secret voice. And fell to sleep.

The next morning we all got up, Uncle Wally, me and Maw and grandpa, and my brother Mike, and Uncle Frank, we ate breakfast, under the dim grayness of the morning, and we all looked a bit grim, all trying to keep busy, Maw trying to put breakfast on the table for everyone and I ate. Then we all finished, and Uncle Frank packed a small suite case of cloths. Maw said, “Honest folks need clean cloths, even when they are headed on to war, and a decent breakfast.”
I brought Frank his coat and hat, it was October, 1944, and maw and grandpa still didn’t cry, somehow I expected them to, but I wanted to, they just stood in front of Frank, and didn’t move. For all she cared, the country and all that was in it, they could have it, so long as they left our family alone. We were not rich, and maw didn’t care to have her brother fight and die for the rich because she believed our blood was as good as any blood anywhere out there, and somehow the rich forgot that, and she wanted to remind them of it. Then she kissed Frank, and Grandpa hugged him, and I hugged him, and held back my tears for later.

4-30-2009 ··